Ten weeks. That’s about how much time Phillip and Lisa Kellogg have to make and sell their product.

For more than 50 years, 10 weeks was the only period of time their factory was in use, the only stretch of days with hair-netted employees and intoxicating aromas and the clatter of machines filling the building.

Nobody buys a caramel apple in January, April or July. Everybody buys caramel apples starting somewhere in the middle of August, when the air first exhibits at least the occasional wisp of chill. People keep buying the enrobed fruit through Halloween — a holiday that is to the caramel apple what Christmas is to candy canes.

And then, business “drops like a rock,” says Phillip Kellogg, the former Iowa farm lad, chef, television producer and computer scientist who now owns Denver’s historic Daffy Apple company.

Kellogg and his wife are trying to expand the northeast Denver factory’s season, adding caramel corn and other products to their menu.

Daffy Apple opened its doors in Denver in 1951. It’s one of the oldest still-operating food businesses in the area and the second-oldest caramel apple factory in the country, Kellogg says.

Its core business is not what you would call complex.

Every day during the season, they get 5 or 6 tons of Granny Smith apples, which sit on the warehouse floor in large cardboard boxes.

These apples — “too small to sell at the market, but too good for juicing,” Kellogg says — are dumped into a machine. Seasonal workers sit around a revolving disc fitted with cups. The workers place apples in the cups. When each cup reaches a certain point, a mechanical arm holding a wooden stick plunges the stick into the apple, picks it up, dips it in a vat of 200-degree caramel, and then rolls the apple in the signature Daffy Apple topping — something like very sweet cornflakes the size of pebbles.

The apples are placed onto a conveyer belt to cool, be packaged and then placed into distribution. They get shipped all over Colorado and the West and parts of the Midwest.

Meanwhile, in copper vats, real caramel — made from sugar, corn syrup (not high-fructose) and milk — slowly turns from the color of soy milk to a deep mahogany.

The company makes about a caramel apple a second, plowing through 40,000 pounds of sugar and 1.2 million apples every season.

The Kelloggs bought the business in 1995 from Phillip’s uncle, who had owned the business for about 10 years. Before then, the company had changed hands several times, but the guy who dreamed up the Daffy Apple, George Leslie Apple, is the step-grandfather of Andrew Hudson, one of Denver’s public relations impresarios and a past spokesman for former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb.

“The story goes he was an apple farmer, and one year the apples came in too small and he could not sell them,” says Hudson. “He created a formula that allowed him to put this candy concoction onto the apples. The thing that was different and special about the formula is, it had an ingredient that let the candy coating stick to the apple. It wasn’t just a normal caramel apple; it let him have this crunch candy on the apple.

“He made a lot of money off it,” adds Hudson. “He and my grandmother, Granny Annie, as a result of his success were able to travel around the world and enjoy life in a lot of special ways that my Granny Annie could not have without the Daffy Apple.”

Caramel apples aren’t yet launching the Kelloggs into the jet-setting life of Granny Annie, but the couple is having fun, says Lisa Kellogg, 42.

“You do a lot of things,” she says, as employees filed into a small break area to feast on barbecue provided by the Kelloggs. “You wear a lot of hats.”

Phillip, 44, who has a degree in computer science from Iowa State, had been working in food development in Los Angeles.

He loved working with food. He was thrilled by machines and automation and computer code. In his job he dealt with all of it, but one day he said to himself: “I can do that, only I can do it a lot better.”

So he bought Daffy Apple from his uncle and got started.

He rebuilt all of the machines. He custom-designed a computer program to make everything run more smoothly and faster. He launched a website that has boosted sales considerably. He sold the caramel to businesses — vendors in the Denver Zoo, for example, and at state fairs — that make fresh caramel apples.

And now, he’s hoping the business will soon be able to operate more than just 10 weeks a year. He’s started a line of caramel popcorn that just hit the shelves in late September.

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